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Hieronymus Bosch’s painting known as The Ship of Fools (c. 1490–1500) has long provoked questions regarding the meaning behind its absurd tableau of singers. For more than a century, critics have taken Bosch’s representation of Franciscans as a sign of his anticlericalism. This article reevaluates Bosch’s possible motivations, taking into consideration the literary and visual cult of folly, the agency of women song collectors, Franciscan songs and preaching method, and the practice of contrafaction in devotional lyric. Appraising the evidence using an interdisciplinary method reveals a program of symbolic inversion at work in Bosch’s painting that implicates the renowned Franciscan preachers Olivier Maillard and Jan Brugman, their religious contrafacta, and those who sang them. Depicting music as folly, I argue that Bosch may have wished to represent inversely the virtues of Franciscan preaching. What better way to portray a penitential song sung to the tune of a well-known love song than by depicting a friar and a nun singing a lute song while surrounded by symbols of lust? Consequently, one might consider these as jongleurs of God, doing something recognizable and following a tradition that goes back to the founders of the order: preaching penance by converting the folly of secular love songs into tools of piety.

Claims about the history of Jewish conversion to Christianity have long been central to key narratives in medieval Jewish historiography. Most famously, they have served to illustrate an alleged cultural contrast between Sepharad, or Spain, and Ashkenaz, or northern Europe. According to this classic view, which was given its fullest expression by Yitzhak Baer in the 1930s and 1940s, the mass conversions of Jews to Christianity that swept Spain in 1391, in the context of the most extensive anti-Jewish violence in medieval history, were the result of Spanish Jews’ engagement with Greek rationalism, their political ambition, and their “passion for erotic experience,” all of which led Spanish Jews to neglect their Jewish heritage. The Jews of northern Europe, by contrast, resisted conversion in the face of violence and instead favored martyrdom (most famously in 1096, at the start of the First Crusade) on account of their single-minded piety. Conversion, in other words, was the outcome of acculturation, and t...

On a hot August day in the summer of 1364, a Roman grocer named Nucio stood idly in a piazza in the contrada known as Ponte di Santa Maria, near the ancient and often damaged Pons Aemilius, just downstream of the Tiber Island. The neighborhood was in the rione Ripa, bustling with the business of fish sellers and millers, who operated small fisheries and floating mills along the river's banks, and with a substantial number of Rome's Jews, whose main center of population was in the neighboring rione of Sant’Angelo. It stood roughly equidistant from the main center of population in the Tiber bend and the more sparsely populated and poorer area now known as Testaccio, where Rome's milites and pedites, divided by neighborhood, did battle with bulls and swine in a ritual combat held annually and funded by exactions from those same Jews. This was not the Campidoglio, the center of communal governance and home of Rome's largest market; it was a small center in a city made up of distinct rioni and their constituen...

The Benedictine convent of Helfta constituted a major center both of female learning and of female piety in Germany during the High Middle Ages. Three of the convent's women are now and were at the time recognized as important mystics of the late thirteenth century: Mechthild of Magdeburg (1210–82), Mechthild of Hackeborn (1241/2–1298) and Gertrude of Helfta (1256–1301/2). None of these women was the sole author of the texts recording her spirituality, and the quality of these collaborative writings attests to a generally high degree of education among the nuns of Helfta. The importance of these women for the history of Christian spirituality derives from their role in developing the devotion to the Sacred Heart, as well as their practice of a particular brand of liturgical piety. In particular, the visionary texts of both Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude of Helfta recount innumerable visions and graces received during the Office and the Mass. These experiences were often apparently inspired by focused...

The personal piety and devotions to saints and their relics of Scotland's most famous medieval monarch, Robert Bruce, or Robert I (1306–29), is an underexplored topic. This neglect is perhaps due both to a predominantly Protestant post-Reformation Scottish historiographical tradition and to a perceived lack of sources. The latter sense is heightened by a general awareness that large quantities of records and artifacts were plundered or destroyed during the prolonged hostilities of the Scottish wars of succession and independence, ca. 1286–ca. 1357, and that further losses occurred in successive centuries. Nevertheless, this paper offers new approaches to identifying and understanding the saintly venerations of King Robert. It seeks to illuminate the wide spectrum of motivations for his acts of piety throughout his reign, from clearly political or dynastic public demonstrations of faith to intensely personal expressions of belief. As a result, some aspects of the changing expectations of both Scottish roya...

Handlyng Synne, Robert Mannyng of Brunne's early-fourteenth-century penitential manual, continues to be a poem better known than read. Although frequently excerpted in undergraduate anthologies, the poem has attracted very little scholarship, and most of that is descriptive rather than analytic and interpretive. Ironically, most scholars have missed the complexity of its engagement with theology precisely because they have accepted D. W. Robertson, Jr.'s demonstration of its dependence on theological convention. Some scholars have implicitly acknowledged Handlyng Synne's textual complexity but have limited their discussions to Mannyng's seven “original” exempla, that is, the exempla that do not appear in Mannyng's source, the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman Manuel des pechiez. Yet Joyce Coleman has recently recovered an important devotional and ecclesiological context for the poem. On the basis of the work's interest in the Eucharist, she argues that Mannyng, a Gilbertine canon, used it as an attempt to g...

On 7 September 1443 Osbern Bokenham, an Augustinian friar of Clare Priory, Suffolk, began writing a life of St. Margaret in English verse for his friend and fellow friar Thomas Burgh.1 The work sparked off a local demand for similar English lives of female saints, and Bokenham received a series of subsequent com missions from prominent members of the East Anglian gentry and nobility. For instance, at a party on Twelfth Night 1445, Dame Isabel Bourchier, sister of Rich ard, duke of York, requested that Bokenham compose a life of Mary Magdalen, a saint for whom she had a particular devotion. Other noblewomen commissioned lives of their patron saints, such as Elizabeth de Vere, wife of the twelfth earl of Oxford, who requested a life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. The result of these individual commissions is a collection of thirteen lives of female saints in verse, which were assembled and copied into a single manuscript in Cambridge in 1447, now London, British Library, MS Arundel 372, and given to a local nunnery.2 This work is now known by the modern editorial title the Legends of Holy Women. This is the sole collection of saints' lives by Osbern Bokenham known to modern scholarship, although it represents but a fraction of his entire output. We know this because, in the prologue to another work dealing with the geography of Brit ain, Mappula Angliae, Bokenham described a much larger compilation

Catherine of Siena (1347-80) knew what was expected of holy women. Domin ican authorities had already established the foundations for a female mystical tradition to match that of the Franciscans, shaping the biographies of Benvenuta Bojanni (1255-92), Vanna of Orvieto (1264-1306), Margaret of Citta di Castello (1287-1320), and Agnes of Montepulciano (1268-1317) into powerful didactic materials for the lay population.1 Catherine's confessor, Raymond of Capua (1330-99), was one of the key architects of this tradition; he was the author of Agnes of Montepulciano's biography and had ambitious plans to further the goals of the Dominican order through his guardianship over Catherine's life and legacy.2 But many aspects of Catherine's life challenged Raymond's construction: The daughter of a wool dyer, Catherine became a Dominican tertiary and rose to prominence through her political activism in Italy on behalf of Popes Gregory XI and Urban VI. She traveled widely and conducted a voluminous correspondence with secular and religious leaders. While her humble origins fit the desired model for female sanctity, her political activity (and the extensive written record that she left behind attesting to this activity) did not correspond to the legacy of intensely private piety as established in the lives of her predecessors. Raymond's biography is thus an effort to craft a more standard spiritual life, focusing on Catherine's prodigious fasting and countless hours spent in ecstatic or deathlike states. Such episodes are not related in Catherine's own textual testimony, as personal detail is of marginal importance in the letters and in her Dialogo. This article will ex amine the centrifugal point from which the biography and the letters diverge, following Catherine's relentless and increasingly bold assertions of her position in the public realm to Raymond's narrative turn, a turn that directs posterity's at tention back toward the personal, into the depths of Catherine's individual female body. This centrifugal point is the heart. The word "cuore" and its variations appear 620 times in 383 letters.3 I contend that Catherine's use of this figure reveals a

The enormous success of the Cistercian order in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries owed much to the great popularity of Bernard of Clairvaux and to his leadership of the order. Between 1098, when Citeaux was founded, and 1153, when Bernard died, the number of new foundations increased more rapidly than at any other time in the order's history. The difficult task of acquiring sufficient patrimony, however, although begun during Bernard's lifetime, continued throughout the rest of the century. Indeed, in most places, acquisition of land must have continued right up to the middle of the thirteenth century. This was certainly the case for the abbey of Berdoues: founded in southern France in the 1140s, the abbey continued to gather land and property rights up to the 1250s. Although much can be attributed to the piety of early donors to the order, the successful Cistercian monastery of the twelfth century acquired its patrimony through careful administrative techniques. These included the recording of each gift or sale to an abbey in a written instrument and in many cases the redaction of the written instruments or charters into cartularies. The cartularies were often arranged in sections concerning particular properties, which made it easy to assess what rights were owned and to locate the proof of these rights when disputes arose. The surviving cartularies are extremely useful tools for monastic and social history in the middle centuries of the medieval period. Cistercian cartularies from southern France record hundreds of donations and other conveyances of property to the order. Charters record not only donations of land, but sales or "disguised sales" of land to the monks: the latter were written in the language of donations, with a cash "gift" from the monks representing the purchase price. Cartularies also record the exchange or leasing of a piece of land by an abbey, the arbitrated settlements of disputes between the abbey and outsiders, and occasionally the rents due on holdings granted to the order. Cistercian charters generally describe the existing status of the land and the rights over it that were being conveyed to the order: rights of lordship or dominium, rights of tenancy, ownership of allodium, feudum, or beneficium. Charters reveal the fragmentation of ownership of particular rights: a quarter of the tithes, an eighth of the dominium, and so forth. Occasionally a charter will mention that the land in question is in mortgage (in pignus) to another individual. In such cases the monastery

ENGLAND'S Edward the Confessor was noted during his life for his religious fervor and faith and, within a few years after his death in 1066, acquired among some of his subjects the reputation of a saint. His first Vita, apparently written before the end of 1075, is the earliest evidence of the rumors of the deceased king's sanctity. This biography summed up the picture of Edward as a saint in its final paragraph.' "That he who was proved a saint in this world," the author wrote, "is now living as a saint in heaven the propitious Deity reveals through these signs at his grave; there, by his intervention, the blind are made to see and the lame to walk again, the sick are cured and the sad consoled; and God, the King of kings, allows these tokens of his piety to happen for the faith of everyone who invokes the Lord."2 In spite of this rapid "canonisatio per viam cultus," the official recognition of the saint by the Church was delayed and was not pronounced until a century later. A first official sanction of the cult may have been the translation of the king's body in 1102. This was perhaps "an episcopal translation performed by Gundulf of Rochester on behalf of the archbishop of Canterbury."3 But another thirty-six years passed by before a serious attempt